40 Years of Electric BMWs You Can’t Buy

Never let it be said BMW cannot develop electric vehicles. The company may not like selling electric vehicles — both the Mini E and Active E were available only through wildly expensive leases — but it seems to like building them. It's been doing so for 40 years, after all.

You probably didn't know that. It's not like BMW has made a big deal of cars that were nothing more than experiments. But now that BMW is on the cusp of launching the i3, its first electric vehicle under the new "i" brand, BMW is reminding folks that it's been churning out fully-functional EVs for years. Forty years, to be exact.

The i3 is about a year from appearing in driveways, but that isn't keeping BMW from throwing open its archives and providing a glimpse at its electric lineage.

Done? Now you know why the 2002 remains an icon, and the car that put BMW on the map in the United States. Davis' piece in Car and Driver solidified the brand's reputation as the ultimate driving machine long before marketing flacks even dreamed up the tagline. The 2002 was countless forms of awesome.

Now imagine it in electric form.

Wait. Don't. BMW tried to do just that, developing the 1602 ("16" refers to the smaller displacement engine) Electric as a technological showpiece for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Too bad it was a complete dog.

With a 32 kilowatt (42 horsepower) DC motor in place of the 1.6-liter four-cylinder engine, it was never gonna be quick. And like nearly every EV that's come down the pike in the past four decades, it was hampered by battery weight — 772 pounds of lead-acid cells, to be exact. This baby was all show and no go. It needed eight seconds to go from zero to 31 mph, and only got around 20 miles on a charge. However, the batteries were mounted on a tray in the engine bay, allowing them to be swapped out with ease (a good thing, since there was no way to plug in), and even in the early 70s, the electric motor doubled as a generator, regenerating power for the pack. We're scouring Craigslist now for a suitable donor to create our own neo-1602 Electric.

BMW LS Electric (1975)

Using the lessons learned from the 1602, BMW's boffins nabbed an LS bound for the crusher and fitted it with a new DC motor from Bosch and 10 Varta lead-acid batteries. This time, they had the smarts to equip it with a plug. The bad news: it took 14 hours to charge, saddled the car with an additional 700 pounds of batteries, was even slower to 31 than the 1620 and would go just 19 miles in city traffic. It was such a disaster that BMW didn't bother to include a picture in its EV retrospective.

BMW 325iX (1987)

The relaunch of the Mini brand was BMW's first foray into front wheel drive (there's talk of a front-driven BMW coming, but try to forget about that for the moment), but BMW experimented with it in the late 1980s and, what's more, it was electric.

The Germans took eight all-wheel-drive 325iX coupes and converted them to FWD, then gave them all battery packs developed by Asea Brown Boveri. The packs used maintenance-free sodium-sulphur (NaS) cells with three times the energy density of lead-acid batteries. They also were much lighter and dramatically smaller, allowing the minimal fleet of 325s to go 93 miles on to a charge. They were so good, in fact, that the German postal service used a touring model. The rest were handed to government workers. Lucky dogs.

BMW E1 (1991)

If there's one car you can point to as the predecessor to the i3, it's the E1, BMW's first ground-up electric vehicle.

Designed from the start as an EV, the E1 was designed to be a versatile and efficient city car, with a compact footprint, room for four people and their stuff and a range of around 100 miles in city driving.

Thanks to an aluminum shell, recycled plastic body panels and an evolution of the NaS battery pack developed for the 325 ix electric, the E1 was a lightweight compared to other EVs. A second version was developed with a new "ZEBRA" battery using sodium-nickel chloride (NaNiCl2) for extended range, improved performance and better service life. And unlike other concepts from the era, the E1 was functional.

So what happened, BMW?

BMW 325 Electric (1992-1997)

BMW loved to put the always popular 3-Series under the knife to see what kind of crazy things it might come up with. And for the better part of the 1990s, engineers developed 25 experimental 3s to test a variety of electric drivetrain components with backing from the German Federal Ministry of Research and Technology.

Some electric 325s were fitted with sodium-nickel chloride batteries, while others used newly developed nickel-cadmium cells. Electric motor output shot up to as much as 45 kW (60 horsepower), quick charging batteries allowed drivers to get to 75 percent capacity in as little as 40 minutes, and engine and brake regeneration could boost range by up to 20 percent. Many of these modified 325s were employed both by BMW and government officials, and much of the technology filtered up to BMW's first commercially available EV.

Mini E (2008)

The Mini E program marked the first time BMW offered an EV to the public. More than 600 hit the road in the United States and Europe in what was essentially a real-world EV R&D program for the technology.

Based on the diminutive hatch that proved Americans would pay a premium for a plush compact car, BMW throttled that mindset by requiring early adopters to shell out $850 a month (which did include a charge station and insurance) for the privilege of driving this rolling testbed. But with a 35 kWh lithium-ion battery pack taking up all the trunk room, even the 200-hp electric motor was barely enough to motivate this 3,600-pound retromobile.

Lithium-ion battery packs were finally implemented, boosting range and performance in the process, and special charging stations available to owners were able to top up the cells in around three hours to provide a theoretical range of 155 miles (real-world use was closer to 100 miles). The data it gleaned from these field trials began to prove the efficacy of EVs as day-to-day vehicles, and nearly all this tech made its way into the first BMW-badged EV.

BMW Active E (2010)

The Mini E begat the Active E, an electric version of the 1 Series coupe.

It was OK, as EVs go, but it completely killed the infinitely fun, absurdly chuckable nature of the smallest Bimmer. Adding 800 pounds of batteries and electronics will do that. But with 125 kW (167 horsepower) and 184 pound-feet of torque, rear wheel drive, a perfect 50/50 weight distribution and a nine-second run to 60 mph, the Active E had a modicum of performance cred. It even had a range of 100 miles.

BMW leased 1,000 of them in the United States and Europe, providing invaluable insights that will make the i3 that much better.